“And what brings you to that deduction?” she asked, one eyebrow characteristically raised in skepticism at her partner.
Giles didn’t look over as he replied. “Well… there was the Molly thing.”
“You mean the Molly thing that you pooh-poohed earlier?” Arlene was impressed by his sudden confession that he was buying into Molly’s visions and not just going along with her deductions.
Giles smiled over at her, daring her to tell him she told him so. “Yes,” he answered simply, just as Arlene would.
The irony in his manner wasn’t lost on her.
“Go on,” she pressed, trying to keep her own expression straight. “What else?”
Giles shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. I remember hearing rumors when we had the original escapades to get it out to Teshov back when we were hiding it from you. But they never shared the details with me as I was… compromised.”
Arlene nodded. “I’d say.”
Giles clocked the humor in her tone and grinned. “Well anyway,” he continued, “I think they still had it. They wouldn’t have sent it out to the Teshov elders to have them both in the same place. My bet is they kept it within the ranks of the order there on Estaria. Just cloaked, or something.”
Arlene rocked gently in her console chair. “And you don’t think I would have checked for it?”
Giles pulled his lips to one side. “I’m guessing if a bunch of them worked together they could conceivably have masked its existence from you… Especially if you didn’t know the energy signature to begin with.”
“Conceivably,” she repeated in agreement.
“And besides,” Giles continued. “why else would Molly see a place on Estaria in relation to it. And doesn’t that room she described sound an awful lot like a certain religious order we know?”
Arlene took a deep breath. “Yes. It does. And I had the same thought myself. But…”
Giles stood up, waiting for her counterargument.
Arlene’s frown deepened as she spoke. “How on Estaria are we going to find that particular building? And that particular girl she mentioned? We have no name. No description. No starting point.”
Giles sighed. “We found the talisman on one moon out of eleven,” he reminded her.
“True,” she acknowledged. “But we need something else to go off.”
Giles ambled back to his chair and leaned on the back of it. “Scamp, any chance you can connect us with ADAM? We could do with some information on Estaria.”
Scamp’s voice came over the intercom. “I’ve sent him a message. I’ll let you know when he responds.”
Giles thought for a moment. “Okay. Or better yet, could you outline our problem and see if he can get us everything available on The Order of the Sacred Ascenders on Estaria.”
Arlene glanced at him. “That’s going to be a lot of information,” she warned.
He nodded. “Yeah. We’ll just have to get into it and see what we can turn up,” he said.
“Okay. Relaying the message now,” Scamp reported. “I’ll let you know when we receive a response.”
Giles sat back down in his console chair. “Right then. In the meantime, let’s set a course back to the Sark System. At the very least it may be worth paying our friends a visit…”
Arlene smiled, getting up. “I was wondering when you were going to make that suggestion,” she said.
Giles ignored her jesting as he watched Scamp set their flight path for the Sark System. A moment later they opened a gate in a flash of blue light and disappeared to the other side of the galaxy.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Aibek Moon, Orn System
Ammo helped Naldrir off his bike. He’d been wounded. So had Mennynad. Mennynad sat on his bike trying to inspect the damage himself.
“Come on, you’re going to be all right,” Ammo grunted, helping hold Naldrir up long enough to get him into the cabin.
Naldrir, reluctant to accept help, tried to hobble on his own, but then stumbled, forcing him to allow Ammo to help him.
Koryss leapt from his vehicle, unscathed and pumped from the action. “Where’s Gagai?” he asked. By way of an answer their leader rolled up slowly, his face like thunder.
Koryss went straight to him and they talked, the sound of the bike masking their conversation.
Ammo in the meantime struggled into the hut with Naldrir, shouting for someone to help Mennynad. His requests were ignored, and as soon as he had deposited Naldrir he went straight back out to help his friend dismount.
Mennynad tried to make light of the situation. “Could have been worse,” he said to Ammo between grunts and winces as they approached the hut. “They could easily have taken us out with their ship.”
Ammo shook his head in despair. “Something far worse happened. They took Jendyg, our brother.” His eyes were sad and though he had no physical wounds bleeding out, his emotional heart was another matter.
Mennynad was about to comfort him when Gagai stormed in, followed by Koryss. “He’s lucky he got away. For what he did, for losing the talisman, he will be condemned to a life of eternal torture by our ancestors.”
Naldrir was slumped against the far wall and lifted his eyes in dry humor. “Sounds like those ancestors are one angry bunch!” he remarked.
Gagai glared at him. “I will not tolerate insubordination. That Jendyg was a bad influence. And he will pay the price for his lack of faith!” he growled.
Ammo helped Mennynad to the floor and then stiffly straightened himself up. “So what do we do now?” Ammo asked, turning to their leader.
Gagai seemed to have a valve open on his emotions and Ammo could see the anger and frustration escape from his over inflated ego as the post-battle exhaustion set in. “We regroup.” He paused. “Although, with the talisman gone, we’ve failed. Our purpose is now obsolete.”
Ammo glanced around at his brothers in arms. “But… we can get the talisman back. We can go and find it and bring it back. There’s still a chance.”
Gagai shook his head. “We have no space-going ships. And those strangers will be long gone. We’ve been here a long time, and who knows what else has been going on out there while we’ve been here.”
Naldrir nodded, his skin paling from lack of blood. “He’s right. We’re removed from our own time out here. We’ve all known it for a long time now. We’ve lived far longer than any other Zhyn. It was something the elders did to us.”
“So what?” Ammo insisted, “We just give up? We stay here and just exist? Until what?”
Gagai didn’t answer. He just ambled out of the hut in a daze.
Ammo glanced over at Koryss. “Is he going to be okay?” he asked.
Koryss’s expression was blank. “I expect, one way or another, yes.”
Mennynad shifted himself upright, pressing on the wound in his chest to stop the bleeding. Ammo moved to help him. He started to tear up rags he had found in the hut. “You’re going to be okay,” he told his friend.
Just then there was a boom from a blaster.
Ammo looked up. “We’re under attack!” he shouted, springing into action and grabbing the weapon that Mennynad had dragged into the hut with him. Like a shot he was at the front door looking out for signs of movement.
Naldrir shouted out to him. “How could they breech the force field around the dome?”
There was no response from Ammo. Instead, Naldrir watched as Ammo lowered his blaster, realizing there were no enemies to fight.
The door ajar, he stood for a moment taking in what he could see. Naldrir shuffled, trying to get up. “What is it?” he asked.
Koryss didn’t need to see to answer. “Gagai has moved on,” he said. “It was the honorable thing to do,” he told them definitively.
The others, stunned, tried to process what had just happened. Ammo looked over at Koryss. “Well, don’t you get any ideas! This lunacy stops, right here. We’re getting off this rock. We’re going to find the elders and we’re going to get our tali
sman back. No more waiting around forgotten. They chose us for a reason and we can deal.”
He glared at Koryss, half-expecting him to challenge him physically. Koryss just looked back at him, and now without his leader or any other purpose, he accepted the new direction. “Okay…” he said slowly. “Okay,” he repeated again, bobbing his head in surrender now.
He started walking across the room. Ammo got out of his way and let him out of the door.
Naldrir chuckled with a humorless expression on his face. “Looks like you just became our new leader,” he told Ammo.
Ammo looked at him in shock for a moment, then remembered his friend needed his help. He returned to tending wounds, but now with a new-found confidence.
The dynamics had shifted. That was for sure. And what had just a moment before been an uncertain future for them was now taking shape with purpose.
Aboard the Scamp Princess, Sark System
“It’s no good,” Arlene huffed, her hands in her hair, elbows on the table in the mess room.
Giles pulled his eyes from the holoscreen he was reading and moved his feet that he had up on the table. “What if we had Scamp try and assimilate all the known locations?” he suggested.
Arlene shook her head. “They’re either not mentioned or they have code names, which aren’t obvious to an algorithm.” She took a deep breath and pushed herself away from the table, despondent. “As we might have expected, they’ve gone to a lot of trouble to remain covert.”
Giles threw a krib seed he had been chewing on into an accumulating pile of husks. He closed his holo and pulled his feet down off the table. “So what are our options?” he asked, genuinely at a loss.
Arlene thought for a moment. “I dunno. Keep going? Start canvassing any buildings that look like they may have belonged to the ord-”
She paused. Her eyes brightened and she looked up at Giles. “Hang on…” she said, pulling up her holo. “What about Oz?”
Giles had put another seed into his mouth and was chewing on it while holding the end of the husk with his fingers. “What about him?”
“Well, he was tapped into the Estarian systems for a while. Maybe he was able to spot patterns that ADAM didn’t.”
Giles rolled his eyes at her. “You do realize that ADAM is THE MOST advanced AI ever to exist, right?”
Arlene waved her hand as she plugged a search into her holo. “Yeah, but sometimes local knowledge is better.” She paused and looked up, knowing she wasn’t convincing him. “It’s worth a try,” she added. “And if it doesn’t work out, then maybe the crew can help us in some way.”
Giles dropped another seed husk into the pile, gently shaking his head. “Well, it will be a break from this, at any rate,” he agreed.
Arlene brightened and her purpose seemed to be returning to her. “I’ve had Scamp reach out to Oz.”
Giles got up.
“Where are you going,” she asked.
“To get showered and changed,” he replied, as if it were obvious.
Arlene frowned. “How come?”
“Because,” he replied, “you can bet that as soon as those AIs start talking they’re going to be setting up a meeting for us to head out to Gaitune. And so I’ll need to be presentable.”
Arlene grinned. “Uh, ha,” she uttered humorously, watching him disappear out of the door to the crew quarters.
***
Giles appeared an hour later, smelling much better and looking a whole lot less like an unshaven bum.
Arlene spun round in her console chair. “You were right,” she said before she clamped eyes on him. Seeing him, she couldn’t help but smile.
Giles grinned. “My favorite words in the universe,” he said, savoring the moment.
“What was I right about?”
“The AIs,” she told him. “Oz has started searching based on the intel we had selected out from ADAM’s data dump, but in the meantime, he has suggested we liaise with Molly on the surface.”
“Of Gaitune?” Giles qualified, confused.
Arlene shook her head. “Estaria. She’s down there doing some big recruitment meeting. Apparently, she’s setting up a university that’s going to change the way things are done in this system.”
Giles’s eye brows lifted up. “Interesting,” he said, after a moment.
Arlene leaned forward into her console chair so it tipped forward and allowed her to put her feet on the floor. “Oz seems to think that our search for the Order is a long-term thing, too.”
Giles frowned. “How long-term?”
Arlene lowered her eyes and prepared herself for delivering the news. “Not a few days,” she said.
Giles expression remained blank.
“Or weeks even,” she added. Her face remained serious.
Giles narrowed his eyes. “You’re meaning much longer then?”
Arlene nodded solemnly. She could see Giles’s brain whirring behind his eyes.
“You’re going to suggest we see if we can get positions at Molly’s university while we wait, aren’t you?”
Arlene’s solemn expression slowly morphed into a smile, which subsequently brightened into a grin. “Oz already has positions picked out for us and has pre-approved us for Molly’s selection, should we be willing.”
Giles rubbed one hand over his face. “You’re kidding?” he asked from beneath his hand.
Arlene shook her head slowly, eyes fixed on him, still grinning. “Plus,” she continued, “he said it would be an excellent cover for any investigating we might need to do in order to track down this next talisman.”
Giles dropped his hand. “Well, I guess it’s all been decided then!” he remarked, his expression changing to one of amusement.
Arlene shrugged. “I guess. Anyway, it’s a good job if you’re ready. Her meeting starts in an hour and Oz has suggested we crash it and surprise her!”
Giles shook his head, chuckling to himself. “Well, let’s do it then,” he said. Then he looked Arlene up and down. “You might want to go and get ready yourself though, too!”
Arlene glared at him, got up from her chair, and stomped out. “Was just about to,” she said, slapping him playfully on the arm as she left.
Giles carried on laughing to himself as he sat in the pilot’s seat of the Scamp Princess.
On to the next adventure, he thought to himself. There’s always a next adventure…
CHAPTER TWENTY
Gaitune-67, Safe House
“I must say,” Giles commented, taking a quick swig of beer and nodding in Molly’s direction, “it was bloody lucky you offered us those positions, else we really would have felt foolish!”
Molly grinned. “Oz gave me a heads up,” she confessed.
Giles’s expression changed to one of more relief. “Ah, that explains it then,” he added.
Molly shook her head. “Not much of a heads up. It was only when we were saying hello that he made the suggestion and admitted that he’d been talking to you. When I laid eyes on you at the back of the room I had no idea how you’d come to be there.” She chuckled. “For a moment I thought I was having another realm walking experience,” she admitted, her gaze falling to Arlene, sitting next to her.
Paige was grinning brightly. “I had no idea until you showed up either!” she shared. Then she looked at the others sitting around the common area, an array of empty pizza boxes and beer bottles strew around. “It was sooooo sweet!” she told them. “The whole audience clapped and cheered when they hugged, and I swear even Molly had a tear in her eye at one point.”
Molly pretended to glare at her, and Paige, playing along, shrunk back in her seat looking sheepish.
“Anyway,” Molly said, picking up the conversation, “it looks like we’re in for a good academic year with you two on board.”
Sean put his empty beer bottle on the mocha table. “Yeah, and I’ll bet there won’t be a dull moment now that you’re back!”
The others laughed. Pieter reached out and patted Giles on th
e back, somewhat awkwardly, but Giles returned the gesture by patting his leg with a very flat hand, patronizingly, like he might a crazy person. Another round of laughter erupted from the group.
He grinned at them all, secretly thrilled to be back.
EPILOGUE
Giles remained in the now quiet common room, waiting for Molly to return from showing Arlene to her quarters. Paige was pottering between the common room and the kitchen, tidying up yet again after the gathering.
Most of the others had already shuffled off to bed, or whatever they did in their down time.
Giles’s eyes were unfocussed as he drifted in the memories of the adventures he’d just been recounting.
Suddenly he had a feeling that he was being watched. He looked around and didn’t see anyone right away. Then there was a movement he caught out of the corner of his eye, just behind the common room holoscreen, out in the main foyer area.
He waited, watching.
“Hello?” he said eventually. “Paige? Is that you?” he asked, despite hearing the clattering of pans and plates in the kitchen. He knew it wasn’t Paige.
There was another movement, and a second later a small Estarian girl stepped out from behind the screen. “No,” she said quietly. “I’m Anne.”
Giles, relieved it wasn’t a realm-walker or an intruder, exhaled. “Ah, well… hello Anne,” he said.
She took another step into the sofa area. “I heard your story,” she ventured.
Giles looked a little smug and leaned forward to see if the bottle in from of him had another swig in it. It did. He picked it up and took a sip. “And did you like it?” he asked.
Anne shook her head. “No,” she said flatly, breaking his pattern.
Giles did a double take. “Oh,” he managed, trying not to choke on the beer.
Anne took another step and then hesitated. “But I may be able to help you,” she said. “With the talisman that is. If you promise to keep me safe and not tell anyone.”
Giles Kurns_Rogue Operator Page 20
